The most joyous season is finally here! That glorious time that we eagerly anticipate all year long. The food! The joyful gatherings! The binoculars! The ducks! I am of course talking about the season of ornithological enumeration. For December is time for the annual Christmas Bird Counts and the Cape Cod Waterfowl census. It’s time to rejoice, and to count birds!
Well, the waterfowl census already happened this past weekend – this bird counting season really flies by. The waterfowl census is an ambitious annual effort by the Cape Cod Bird Club to count all the ducks and other waterbirds on all the ponds on the Cape, and this was its 41st year. As of writing, 76% of precincts, by which I mean ponds assigned to volunteers, have reported. That’s not enough to compare this year with other years, but I can give you some numbers – the most abundant species by far was.....I’ll give you a second to guess. It’s small, it’s cute... it’s the Bufflehead.
Every year, this adaptable, adorable little diving duck is the most common species on the Cape’s ponds, as well as the most likely to be confused with a rubber ducky. Males sport bloated, pumpkin-proportioned black and white heads, while females are dark and inconspicuous. They’re also common in saltwater coves, harbors, and marshes. Despite this abundance, some folks don’t know who they are – one person recently sent me a video of a Bufflehead thinking it was a puffin.
You’ll never guess the second most abundant duck, so I’ll dispense with the suspense – it's Greater Scaup. The reason you’d never guess is because they tend to all be on just a few ponds, so the average person never sees them. A thousand of the 1700 Greater Scaup counted this past weekend were on one pond in Harwich, where they feed mainly on freshwater mussels. The next most common species were ones you may have guessed before – Canada Goose and Mallard. Thirty years ago, American Black Duck would have been neck and neck with mallard, but they have declined by 17% over the 41 years of the count, as well as throughout the northeast, for mysterious reasons.
While we’re out dutifully tallying all these waterfowl, we of course hope to run into some other good birds. The folks covering ponds in South Orleans found a tardy and lost White-rumped Sandpiper feeding on the small beach of a heavily wooded pond. This was weird for several reasons, including the late date and the totally out of character habitat – I’ve never heard of one showing up in the woods like this, but it was happily pulling worms out of the cold, wet sand. Others of its kind are in Argentina by now – White-rumps fly from the Arctic to southern South American each year, sometimes flying 2500 miles without stopping. Maybe this one did that math and decided on more of a staycation this year.
For my part, I stumbled upon a rare songbird as I headed back to the car after counting the ducks at Herring Pond in Eastham, one that has only been seen about 10 times on the Cape and Islands. It was an Audubon's Yellow-rumped Warbler, the rarely encountered western subspecies of this familiar warbler of winter. Back before I was born these two were separate species called Audubon's and Myrtle Warblers, Myrtle being the ones here in the east that often spend the winter here eating bayberries, or myrtle berries, and there’s been talk about splitting them again, giving a lot of us another species on our life list with the stroke of a pen. If you see a Yellow-rumped Warbler with a yellow throat visiting your suet, it’s one of the fancy western ones, so get a photo.
With the waterfowl census all buttoned up for the year, birders are looking forward to the Christmas Bird Counts, which start this weekend. Stay tuned here for up-to-the-minute results. Until then, happy season of bird counting to one and all! Also, it’s the holidays, so you might want to get on that, too.
